I don't really understand why they stiffed him (the only thing I can think of is that he's the core maintainer of Sonarr which might make him legally radioactiv

I don't really understand why they stiffed him (the only thing I can think of is that he's the core maintainer of Sonarr which might make him legally radioactive, but you should tell him), but what I don't understand is why they even called him in the first place. There's about a billion package managers for desktop operating systems and programming languages (shoot, Microsoft runs five or six), and the ups and downs are known by anyone who's used one for more than an hour (shoot, look at the winget issue tracker, there's still active tickets that were filed in the first week). There's no reason to play the wine and dine game, there's no secret sauce anyone really needs to know.